I’m 44 and suffered from OCD all my life that I can remember. I have intrusive thoughts almost all the time. These range from killing myself in many ways to killing others in many ways. It’s hard when talking to people as I see myself harming them or something happening to them all the time and sometimes I get distracted within then thoughts. I feel alone as I don’t think others understand and I do tend to not tell many about this side of my OCD. (Although i still have many people thinking it’s all about cleaning and washing my hands thanks to the media picking this type of OCD to use witch is about 10% of OCD sufferers have) I sink deep into my mind and often can feel myself slipping away as the voice in the back of my mind tells me to harm myself or worse. I’m not sure why I’m writing this I’ve tried seeking help and just been told that they are not equipped to handle my form of OCD and moved me on to another waiting list for another department or place to go to. I have started a YouTube channel in the hope of others getting involved and maybe telling people how they suffer and it’s not just all about the cleaning side of things. Not sure if this makes any sense as my OCD voice restricts me from saying many things I want to as well as doing things I want to. Thanks for reading if you managed to get this far.

Hi, I’m new to this app and I’m not sure if it’ll help me, but I’ll try anything to get better. For anyone who wants to read, here’s my story: I think I began having OCD when I was young, after my parents divorced and I went through being abused by the parent I was living with, while also going through bullying at school. I went through a trauma, and that’s when it set in. I’m now 21, and within the past 2 years I’ve got my first car, first real job, moved out on my own, and had a baby. So a lot of major life changes. This has thrown the OCD into a state that’s just unmanageable. I can’t fold laundry because it’s impossible to get it perfect, so it stays in the dryer. I can’t clean up anything without having absolute silence and taking hours. It’s hard to shower, having to OCD anything I touch. It’s hard to make dinner, it’s hard to wash dishes. Everything is hard anymore. I tried medication, but it just gave me severe headaches and dizziness, which only agitated my OCD more. I just want hope that this is something that can indeed be treated. It only keeps getting worse with age and it’s extremely hard to live a normal life like this. If anyone has similar stories feel free to share, I will definitely read them.

Hi I’m Matt. I’m new. I’m struggling a lot even to write this, my mind feels confused, uncertain, tired, I can’t line up my thoughts, I’m not even sure I know how or what to think anymore, I feel dizzy, anxious, short of breath, cold, frightened, empty, and I just want to sleep. That’s how I’m feeling right now and every second of my life in general. It didn’t use to be that way, it just happened over the past few years and became unbearable during the last. I’m not very good at being concise, but I’ll try. I’ve had OCD since I was a kid, it started out when I was around 8 as what looked like a contamination fear. I would wash my hands several times a day until they bled. Then a couple of years later it morphed in some sort of mystical/ethical/moral OCD. I’m agnostic but I was brought up catholic, and that education really messed with my head. Religion terrified me. I would always feel dirty, guilty, a sinner and I would do the sign of the cross hundreds of times a day. My parents saw all this, they thought it was a quirk, a phase. And did absolutely nothing about it. Growing up, in my early teens I started to have verbal intrusive thoughts (horrible insults directed at dead people kept coming up and I would do mental compulsion to chase them away). I was also scared of hurting people. When I was around 14/15 I started fearing of beating a pedophile and that I would end up murdering the people I loved the most, as well as hurting people in general. It was very distressing to me and I did not talk about to anyone. I felt so guilty towards my parents too, because I tried to avoid any family situation that involved younger children (bear in mind I was a child too, 14-15) and when I was forced I would behave weirdly and try to avoid those children as much as possible. That showed and my mother hated me for that. I saw a couple of therapists and even though I talked about my fear of arming people and the fact that I was uncomfortable around children (I didn’t specifically say that I was afraid of being a pedophile at the time, because to me that was way worse than being a murderer). No of them figured out I had ocd. I discovered I had it via my own research when I was 24. I was a textbook case. All check boxes ticked. I was living all over Europe so I did not see a therapist for a few years (also because my previous experiences were so discouraging). At the age of 28 the intrusive thoughts were giving me a really hard time. So I sought for help. I was broke and I didn’t want to ask my parents for money (also because the general idea there was: psychologists are just for nutjobs and weak people. Buckle up) so I called the Italian NHS and ask for therapy, they said the waitlist was at least a year… but hey, if you wanna take drugs no problem, the psychiatrist can see next week). I have always been against psychiatric drugs but I was so desperate at that point and I thought that my ailment was so incurable that I caved in. During a 20 minutes visit the doctor confirmed that I had OCD and gave 20mg of paroxetine which was soon replaced by lexapro 20mg. Ten years have passed since then. I’ve been on and off medications and therapy until I got tinnitus right before the first lockdown and that was devastating. I started doing therapy again and they gave me a mix of ssris, antipsychotic drugs and benzos. Those drugs destroyed me and I felt so numb and pathetic and I lost interest in everything. There was also some cannabis use going on (which before the meds was good for me. I started smoking THC very late in life, Whalen I was about 33, to come off the benzos I was prescribed and I hated. Before tinnitus and meds, I would smoke weed and watch history documentaries for hours, after that I would solely smoke for the purpose of numbing myself). Tinnitus with OCD is an explosive mix, because it’s a sound that works exactly like an intrusive thought, if you engage with it, it gets worse). I was completely destroyed end not functional at all. I started obsessing over my tinnitus, the fact that I would never hear silence again, the fact that I couldn’t sleep, make music, read, focus, work, even think anymore. I would check my IQ to see if tinnitus was causing neurological damage. I thought that I had become completely stupid and I couldn’t recall anything anymore. The therapist I was seeing was well aware that I had severe ocd, I was very specific about that, but she would just “treat” the distress, my episodes and the subsequent depression. She did nothing for ocd. The kept medicating me and finally they gave me venlafaxine which made me suicidal. What did my therapists do when I told them that such meds were giving me those thoughts? They recommended hospitalisation telling me a fairy tale about this wonderful place that did individual and group therapy, group work and exercise, walks, talks, even a gym! It turns out it was the kind of 1950s sanitarium you see in scary movies. Worse than a prison, I’m not kidding. All they did was pumping people full of sedatives and drugs and there was no therapy whatsoever. I went there voluntarily with the specific purpose of coming off meds in a protected environment and so I did, even though they made me stop cold turkey and they kept insisting on giving me other drugs, which I refused. That was last October. I haven’t taken any meds since them and I don’t want to take any anymore, I’m still suffering from withdrawals and I still don’t feel like myself. Well it comes to recent days and my last therapist who I tried to be as accurate as I could with and after while she told me that I had to choose what problems I wanted to work on, and eventually when I was talking about my financial issues (never saying I couldn’t pay her fee) she told me to “come back when you have the money”. Obviously she did not even address my ocd. Now I’m all alone and hopeless. I’ve got maybe two friends and my best friend basically told me she does not have the time and the mind for this and she’s very busy. So I’m basically living with my mother who has a ton of issues too and even though she’s great and loves me dearly does not really know how to help me. What I have now is completely all-encompassing. I can’t work, I can’t watch a movie, read a book, be around people, nothing… my inner monologue is always there and has taken over every aspect of my life, my ocd is everywhere and makes me doubt everything about myself, my choices, my life, even my own thoughts. I don’t trust anyone and especially I don’t trust myself. Every second of my life is pain, mental torture, dizziness, tiredness, anxiety. I don’t enjoy anything anymore. Nothing. I loved music, IT, languages, history, politics, diy, so many things… now? Nothing. I just wanna lie in bed and go through my paranoias for the millionth time all over again. Hoping I would soon fall asleep but at the same time fearing it because then I’ll have to wake up an live. I don’t wanna die, but I can’t live anymore. I thought my OCD would just stay the way it was (I had kinda learned how to cope with it a little bit) but now it has morphed into this life consuming thing that never goes away. On top of that in the past 3 years I went to a fair share of trauma: tinnitus, a very heavy breakup that I’m still obsessing about, met a very abusive and manipulative person that completely destroyed what was left of me and my life. Those are the most notable ones. I also have major depression, autistic traits and probably narcissistic traits. Ok I guess that’s it, sorry for the very long post.

Hey everyone! I’m new here and thought that it might help to get my OCD story off my chest. My intrusive thoughts are so bad that I never want to talk about them to anyone so maybe that’s why I’m here. When I was 13 my grandma was in the hospital. She was my best friend in the whole world. I imagined so much life with her. I remember pulling into the hospital one day with my Dad and immediately knocking on “wood” (the car door) to help put me at ease about my grandmas health before going in. I knocked on wood because everyone knows that’s what you do when you don’t want something to happen. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her so bad that all I could think about in that moment was something bad happening. So I knocked on wood. It made me feel better so I kept doing it whenever I had bad thoughts. But then it going confusing. If this was helping ease these thoughts, why was I starting to have these thoughts more frequently? 13 year old me didn’t understand what I was doing or why these bad thoughts started. It had got so bad that I was knocking on wood every second of the day, every surface I came across that felt right, and if I didn’t I would force myself to turn around and touch that surface. I would have to knock on wood 8 times every single time but the 7 would have two knocks because the word 7 have two syllables. But then the 8 times wouldn’t be enough, I still wouldn’t feel satisfied so I would do it again and again and again until my entire day was overpowered by intrusive thoughts or knocking on wood. My family and friends started to notice, asking why I do it. I would always avoid the question or make a joke out of it because I couldn’t tell them these terrible thoughts I was having. I was so deeply afraid of something bad happening to the people I love the most or myself that it was debilitating. A couple years later I noticed how bad it had gotten and wanted a change. So I forced myself to stop knocking. I would tell myself angrily that nothing bad would happen if I don’t knock. It took me a lot of convincing and small steps to realize this, but it worked. I got better. I went to the doctors office at about 15 and told them everything. How I did this but how I solved this. They told me it takes great mental strength to be able to fight something in your brain like that. I have always been so mentally strong but hearing them say that made me feel so much better. And I was better. For years. Yea I went through times when it was bad again but it was so much better. The past couple years it has gotten worse again. I noticed that it gets worse when my anxiety about things is higher. New changes, new people, new things. Now, at 21 I won’t let myself get back to the point I was when I was 13, but recently I can’t seem to keep the intrusive thoughts out. I am so terrified of myself or someone else getting hurt of getting older that I put the whole toll on myself. I am so so so happy with my life right now that I don’t want anything to change. That is why it’s been so bad recently. Life is amazing which is why I only want it to get better and I’m so scared something might get in the way of that. I realized after talking to my friends that I never want to say my intrusive thoughts out-loud because I believe strongly in speaking things into existence so I only speak good things out loud. That’s how I’ve always been. But when I talked with my friend she said she’s the opposite, she says the bad things out loud because then you jinx them and they won’t happen. Her saying that gave me a little peace because it made me realize that it’s okay to get these things off my chest and that saying these things out loud isn’t so serious, it’s not life or death like I thought it was. Honestly, the weight of getting my story off my chest has already helped me feel a little lighter of a load on myself.